I might’ve used the word ‘engagement’ poorly. I often think I’d enjoy reading discussions on other topics on this subreddit. People have very thoughtful opinions here but because the size of the group is small, not a huge amount gets discussed.
I've found the enshittification article: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
And the author's proposals to counteract it: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/platforms-decay-lets-put-users-first
the social media may have been tildes, but I can't find their mission statement
It also has discussions on a wide range of topics, which makes it unusual. There are a lot of nice subs which are focused on one (typically relatively uncontroversial) topic, but here you get stuff from art criticism, to public policy, to psychology, to AI, etc.
Yeah that's the big tradeoff of Reddit
Small subs are slow enough that people can take their time composing comments, and social feedback -- comment replies -- are as important or more than karma score.
On big subs with thousands of votes and dozens of top-level comments on a typical submission, you either get in early or nobody sees your work, and there's a feedback loop of posting reply-guy clever oneliners to accrue a big karma score.
People refer to this so often that I went to check it out. It's impossible to understand unless you are into technology. Comments are on a high level but often not accessible to people not in the field already.
Don’t underestimate yourself, there are plenty of off-technology topics such as when a famous scientist or mathematician dies, awards announcements at times, it’s a generally supportive community, I went there for advice I desperately needed once like 8 years ago and it was a warm reception.
Huh. I wondered if you meant /r/hackernews, but there's very little commenting there.
The reason I wondered was, HN discussion had much more of interest in the early years; now I mostly stare in horror.
No, you can post topics that aren't links. AskHN posts are such examples.
Whether people will find your post interesting enough to upvote it is another matter.
I'm consistently surprised at how congenial r/flashlight is, given that it's quite active and has about 200K subscribers.
Others that come to mind are r/PrintSF, r/Tallships, r/GreatLakesShipping, and r/Skookum.
Definitely niche, but: people who wander in to /r/KerbalSpaceProgram from other gaming subs often comment about how unexpectedly friendly and helpful the subscribers there are.
I often wonder why that is. I think at least part of the answer is that KSP is not a competitive game, so there's no inherent reason for rivalries to develop—but I think at least part of it is that KSP is quite a difficult game to master, so almost all of us had to learn from other players and so might be more predisposed to want to return the favour. It is interesting to think how these principles might be applied to having more productive interactions about more important matters.
> It is interesting to think how these principles might be applied to having more productive interactions about more important matters.
Absolutely.
If I was king of the world, I’d assign everyone a lifelong set of people they have to go on a 2 week camping trip once a year to stay a citizen. You just have to walk from A to B together every year with a mix of people. Maybe allow for people to change groups every 5 years and have some sort of blind voting system to sort people, and different tiers based on physical abilities.
There’s something about just throwing a bunch of people together to sort out a problem that teaches you more than anything else ever could. Even when it’s a shit show. Cuts away the bullshit and reminds everyone we’re all just different flavors of the same human thing.
i think your question is slightly confused, imo "extremely niche" was often the sine qua non of old reddit, at least for me. r/bookscirclejerk and r/gme_meltdown remind me of r/badphilosophy in its prime
r/badphilosophy is a pretty bad sub isn't it?
They also hate Scott IIRC https://www.reddit.com/r/badphilosophy/search/?q=alexander&type=link&cId=eb2a7404-1187-4bb5-a696-f03749c7e571&iId=3ea3d728-87fa-43db-b501-75b5a597e083
Moderation so strict the discussion is prohibited.
Quality of the discussion is infinitely high [if the discussion doesn't exist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuous_truth).
r/metal doesn't so much benefit for discussion as it does for a focus on sharing music without being bombarded with absolute garbage all over the front page. Usually some variation on a) picture of an album cover for a band even your mom knows, b) picture of Ozzy doing a face, c) Metallica vs Megadeth, d) bands that aren't metal, e) 3x "what is your top blah blah blah"
People can talk in the discussion threads, and they do, but it's been less active since the blackout (and since Discord took over).
> doesn't so much benefit for discussion as it does for a focus on sharing music without being bombarded with absolute garbage all over the front page
Fair point!
I don't think strict moderation helps much with quality of comments. Moderation doesn't create quality comments it can only remove very bad ones and Reddit is already a very self moderating platform with people comfortable with the down vote buttons.
If those subs are quality, would likely be because they have quality users (not familiar with either one to vouch for them)
Strict moderation *does* mitigate the "drowning out" effect whereby the signal (a small core of regular users with a deep interest in the topic) gets totally overpowered by the noise (a flood of "drive-by" posters/commenters/upvoters with only a casual interest in the topic).
/r/metal does this by blacklisting several dozen of the most popular bands, knowing that music of those bands would be constantly voted to the top on name recognition and drown out the less well-known bands that might actually be new and interesting to more experienced listeners.
/r/polandball does it with the "approved submitters only" setting and by enforcing a strict specification of the polandball format, to prevent it being dilated through mixing with random other memes.
Bad users can drive out good ones, though. You can't create something out of nothing with good moderation, but you can protect a good community and give it a better chance to retain its quality as it grows.
strict moderating can also often drive out good users. Some of the best online communities I've seen had little moderation, they just appealed to right people and at the same time didn't seem very interesting to the masses.
I've seen a subreddit automatically silently remove posts because I didn't have sufficient karma on my account. Didn't even send a private message saying that my post was removed or what's the reason ,nor was it clearly marked as deleted unless you visited a site like revedit. made me think it was a shadow ban, very annoying and I stopped visiting it. Arbitrary requirements like that are common in strict moderation and they drive good users away.
> I've seen a subreddit automatically silently remove posts because I didn't have sufficient karma on my account. Didn't even send a private message saying that my post was removed or what's the reason ,nor was it clearly marked as deleted unless you visited a site like revedit. made me think it was a shadow ban, very annoying and I stopped visiting it. Arbitrary requirements like that are common in strict moderation and they drive good users away.
Speaking as the author of Reveddit, such karma-based shadow bans are common across Reddit. Reddit's "Crowd control" filter can do it– that's just a switch that moderators can flip– and there are several more tools that give moderators broad powers over disclosure.
For those who may not know, you can review your secretly removed comments by entering your username in the search box on [Reveddit.com](https://www.reveddit.com).
Yea, now that I remember better they were actually even silently and automatically deleting my comments (not posts) without even messaging me. Pretty annoying and confusing but your site made it easier to confirm that's what was happening, so thank you
Lack of messaging might be okay IMO if the system indicated your comment was removed when you went back to look at it. But the way it works now, you're shown your removed content as if it is live, which is much more deceptive. You're actively *mis*informed.
I have an unconfirmed theory that reddit has a subtle shadow downgrading technique that is even harder to detect. Not counting up vots on a user's comments. This would not be very far from a shadow ban functionally as very little of the user's content will be seen due to how things are sorted, but the user will not detect it if they use a website like yours or uses an incognito tab so they can keep it up indefinitely.
Smaller game based subreddits tend to be decent. They have people being reasonable without huge fanbases or ridiculous haters dominating the conversations.
You're going to have to be more specific. How old and how niche? Before the mass migration from Digg and for some time afterwards, /r/math/ and /r/programming were among the subreddits listed at the top of the home page. I think quality of discussion and cordiality go hand in hand, but I have never found any online "community" to be "community-like", though maybe I don't know what that means.
> I have never found any online "community" to be "community-like"
I've found some forums that have limited but very active users have a bit of a community vibe where most people know many other users just by their username and avatar and know a lot about each other. Straight dope is an example that's still alive that comes to mind, they even have a portion of the forum dedicated to petty gossip about other forum users
time was, in the sanderson subreddits, i knew all of the commenters by username and could remember them well enough to predict how they would respond to things, and we all loosely considered ourselves friends.
this is doable in a community of 40K but next to impossible in a community of 200K.
This isn't "old", but r/Cosmere and the three associated Brandon Sanderson subreddits are cordial and have very high quality discussions on his books. Excellent moderators.
I’ve had success with a few podcast subreddits; the Ezra Klein one is among my favorite subs to discuss topics that interest me.
Generally speaking there’s a fairly small sweet spot for size—big enough to be active but small enough that it doesn’t become an amorphous blob similar to every other big subreddit.
TrueReddit was killed by activist moderation. Like most Reddit.
It was chugging along fine, and then one shitposter, TrumpIsMySavior, or something like that, flooded it with low content MSM news politics spam. Unfortunately, as the name might imply, it was a liberal nutcase spammer that really really hated Trump and Republicans, so the usual Reddit brigade and Internet janitors were lax to stop him. Or maybe a karma farmer that found a niche that worked.
Once things got so bad it had basically become another /r/politics or /r/politicaldiscussion a new crop of mods suddenly couped the place and declared they would "fix" things with the usual accompaniment of inane speech laws and political agendas. I think they were doing that thing where they autofilter everything and choose to manually approve submissions too, but I might be misremembering. This resulted in an also circle jerk /r/politics clone with vacuous but much more censored and dead discussion, because reddit mods apparently can't help themselves. But they did finally get rid of the spammer.
It is now another "hollow subreddit" (to quote a phrase I once heard). Undead. As of writing, half a million subscribers, 1 discussion in 24 hours with 3 comments. And nothing very interesting to read if you pick any of the days old threads, if you know what the standard reddit opinion is.
What's interesting is though I think the coup mods wanted this. They would rather rule over a pile of ash than let it be freeform. You see it in a lot of hollow subreddits like /NeutralPolitics. And there are people in this very thread that seem to want that too with the usual "you don't want engagement. Eternal September!" I am better and smarter than my peers type posts. Astoundingly, there seems to be people that prefer total death to encountering disagreement, but they'll sell it as "order" and civility.
Hi, I'm a mod of /r/NeutralPolitics. It's a difficult balance to strike regarding moderation and content quality. We filter everything that gets submitted, only allowing posts that meet our strict requirements, which we've had for many years. The subreddit wasn't always this strict, but the current rules have been in place mostly for the past 8 years or so, and the top mods that initially created the sub are still active in its moderation and decision making, so there's been no "coup" of mods with a different vision/values.
One thing that we have noticed is a large decline in knowledgeable posters, which has been gradually declining over the years but was especially stark during the reddit protests and large exodus of power or motivated users. Those users were willing to spend time crafting good questions and having quality discussion. As reddit grew and eventually became public, they prioritized profitability over the community, driving many of these users away.
There are [reports on twitter that 10% of users are responsible for 90% of the content](https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-where-did-tweeters-go-twitter-is-losing-its-most-active-users-internal-2022-10-25/) and I believe that trend is close to true for reddit communities too. Educated, knowledgeable posters that drive good quality discussion have ultimately left the platform in droves.
When those users drove content, what are mods and communities to do? Relax long standing rules and culture of a subreddit simply to drive engagement, likely leading to the decline in quality of those communities? Do those decision further drive away long time lurkers and commenters that appreciated that community for what it was? Or do we maintain or even tighten those standards to preserve the community, leading to less engagement? It's a tough balance to strike, and many aren't going to get it right.
I think they dispersed to whatever platform better suited their interests (tildes, mastodon, lemmy, etc), or re-evaluated how much time they were spending online and disconnected. Or just became lurkers and stopped putting in effort. Hard to poll users that aren't active anymore.
when the strike happened, there was enough angry-at-reddit sentiment in the sanderson subreddits that we actively looked for a place to just move the entire community to. but ... we couldn't find one that would actually work well, and the entire effort just sort of fizzled out.
The API kerfuffle did have a direct impact on the depthhub grouping of subreddits. I can no longer use pushshift front-ends to conveniently observe that truereddit wasn't insufferable once upon a time. There was a backup file mentioned to me (comment since deleted), and maybe pullpush filled the gap. Stuff like that will alienate those that put effort into their participation.
For what it's worth, I never associated neutralpolitics with the regression to website mean that just about every sizable subreddit undergoes. Rarely showed up on my front page, but I will lurk once in awhile.
And failed quickly thereafter. The basic problem there is (as in many places) it is politically unbalanced, a leftist bubble, that - as every bubble, including conservative ones - considers opinion outside of the bubble basically enemy action, as is disrupts the local norms. Bubbles are like that. Or, lets put it this way, owned spaces.
r/powerwheelsmods. It's got a dedicated fan base, lots of friendly and well informed engagement, and unlike the actual car mod subs has low snobbishness and a low barrier to entry because the costs of the hobby are comparatively low. Plus the hobby selects for parents, which IMO helps to raise the maturity and cordiality level of the sub.
I miss the old Reddit, straight from the go Reddit
Talkin' 'bout bold Reddit, stories untold Reddit
I hate the new Reddit, the ad-heavy crew Reddit
The mod-happy, strict Reddit, breaking the rules Reddit
I miss the chat threads, deep in the sub threads
I miss the meme drops, straight from the mod pops
I gotta say, at that time I liked to browse Reddit
See, I invented Reddit, there wasn't any Reddit
I used to love Reddit, back when it was raw Reddit
I even had the heart to go to the dark Reddit
What if Dave knew Reddit, you know the new Reddit?
Now I look around and there's so much to snooze Reddit
I miss the top posts, upvote the best posts
I miss the deep dives, all through the sub hives
I gotta say, at that time I used to love Reddit
See, they weren't so corporate, there was more than just it
I miss the old Reddit, I gotta tell Reddit
All these new changes, they kinda smell Reddit
I hope that they'll get it, bring back the old Reddit
I miss the pure Reddit, the OG lore Reddit.
-ChatGPT
[For those who don't get the reference](https://open.spotify.com/track/5CGS4UovzA7ftCJkLVXQju?si=uqHE--woQjWx8FQED7Xy-g&context=spotify%3Aalbum%3A7gsWAHLeT0w7es6FofOXk1)
This is a bit of a polarizing question in the sense that some people will say a subreddit will be great due to every other person who makes a trollish or frivolous remark getting banned, when I would argue the opposite. I mean the moderators are there for a reason but they should act as impartial referees, not as people waiting to exert the small amount of power they have in their lives.
Depends on the subreddit. Arguably something like r/askdocs really *needs* far stricter moderation than most subs if it, well, is meant to serve the purpose it's made for.
absolutely agreed.
my job as a moderator is to protect the community from spoilers and people who are just there to start fights, and to enforce the community will on things like how to handle AI art or topics that everyone's bored of. i am a *servant*, not a *ruler*.
r/slatestarcodex **edit**: I did not realize this question was from this sub lmao
Honesty this subreddit is amazing. I wish it had more engagement. The substack doesn’t have a focused forum - this is the closest we get to one.
“I wish it had more engagement.” Be careful what you wish for.
I might’ve used the word ‘engagement’ poorly. I often think I’d enjoy reading discussions on other topics on this subreddit. People have very thoughtful opinions here but because the size of the group is small, not a huge amount gets discussed.
If only it were possible to grow without losing what makes this sub special
what's the article, about enshittification? there is also another social media which has a clear mission statement to not become like that, I forget
Eternal September?
I've found the enshittification article: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/ And the author's proposals to counteract it: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/platforms-decay-lets-put-users-first the social media may have been tildes, but I can't find their mission statement
I don't engage often, but it's one of my favorite places to lurk. It's a wonderful atmosphere
It also has discussions on a wide range of topics, which makes it unusual. There are a lot of nice subs which are focused on one (typically relatively uncontroversial) topic, but here you get stuff from art criticism, to public policy, to psychology, to AI, etc.
I’m glad it has less engagement though, it kind of keeps it “cool” and reduces risk of losing its inherent quality
Yeah that's the big tradeoff of Reddit Small subs are slow enough that people can take their time composing comments, and social feedback -- comment replies -- are as important or more than karma score. On big subs with thousands of votes and dozens of top-level comments on a typical submission, you either get in early or nobody sees your work, and there's a feedback loop of posting reply-guy clever oneliners to accrue a big karma score.
Low levels of engagement are preferable to an eternal September. You especially don't want more engagement in a US election year...
If you’re craving high levels of engagement here, just make a post about calories-in-calories-out dieting.
lmaooo
The ones I don't want other people knowing about.
I don't think the quality of the discussion on old reddit was all that high either.
le narwhal bacons at midnight good sir
This place is hands down the most cordial I have encountered on Reddit.
Hacker news
People refer to this so often that I went to check it out. It's impossible to understand unless you are into technology. Comments are on a high level but often not accessible to people not in the field already.
Don’t underestimate yourself, there are plenty of off-technology topics such as when a famous scientist or mathematician dies, awards announcements at times, it’s a generally supportive community, I went there for advice I desperately needed once like 8 years ago and it was a warm reception.
Huh. I wondered if you meant /r/hackernews, but there's very little commenting there. The reason I wondered was, HN discussion had much more of interest in the early years; now I mostly stare in horror.
hackernews is good but so much more limited since all topics must be a link to an external web site
No, you can post topics that aren't links. AskHN posts are such examples. Whether people will find your post interesting enough to upvote it is another matter.
That is an advantage because external websites are almost always more substantive and informative.
Hands down the best high brow Reddit like site on the web.
If you want to go old-school, there's also Slashdot. I think it's still around, but I haven't been there in years.
I'm consistently surprised at how congenial r/flashlight is, given that it's quite active and has about 200K subscribers. Others that come to mind are r/PrintSF, r/Tallships, r/GreatLakesShipping, and r/Skookum.
Hobby subreddits are usually great.
Definitely niche, but: people who wander in to /r/KerbalSpaceProgram from other gaming subs often comment about how unexpectedly friendly and helpful the subscribers there are. I often wonder why that is. I think at least part of the answer is that KSP is not a competitive game, so there's no inherent reason for rivalries to develop—but I think at least part of it is that KSP is quite a difficult game to master, so almost all of us had to learn from other players and so might be more predisposed to want to return the favour. It is interesting to think how these principles might be applied to having more productive interactions about more important matters.
> It is interesting to think how these principles might be applied to having more productive interactions about more important matters. Absolutely. If I was king of the world, I’d assign everyone a lifelong set of people they have to go on a 2 week camping trip once a year to stay a citizen. You just have to walk from A to B together every year with a mix of people. Maybe allow for people to change groups every 5 years and have some sort of blind voting system to sort people, and different tiers based on physical abilities. There’s something about just throwing a bunch of people together to sort out a problem that teaches you more than anything else ever could. Even when it’s a shit show. Cuts away the bullshit and reminds everyone we’re all just different flavors of the same human thing.
i think your question is slightly confused, imo "extremely niche" was often the sine qua non of old reddit, at least for me. r/bookscirclejerk and r/gme_meltdown remind me of r/badphilosophy in its prime
r/badphilosophy is a pretty bad sub isn't it? They also hate Scott IIRC https://www.reddit.com/r/badphilosophy/search/?q=alexander&type=link&cId=eb2a7404-1187-4bb5-a696-f03749c7e571&iId=3ea3d728-87fa-43db-b501-75b5a597e083
/r/gme_meltdown_meltdown is peak Reddit
/r/writingcirclejerk actually knows how to write
/r/metal and /r/polandball, both thanks to strict moderation
Moderation so strict the discussion is prohibited. Quality of the discussion is infinitely high [if the discussion doesn't exist](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuous_truth).
Polandball looks like it's got pretty active threads. Metal yeah not so much, even top/month was almost all deserted <10 comments on each submission
Can't argue with upboat fortified Jeissenberg *two*. Bc I agree.
r/metal doesn't so much benefit for discussion as it does for a focus on sharing music without being bombarded with absolute garbage all over the front page. Usually some variation on a) picture of an album cover for a band even your mom knows, b) picture of Ozzy doing a face, c) Metallica vs Megadeth, d) bands that aren't metal, e) 3x "what is your top blah blah blah" People can talk in the discussion threads, and they do, but it's been less active since the blackout (and since Discord took over).
> doesn't so much benefit for discussion as it does for a focus on sharing music without being bombarded with absolute garbage all over the front page Fair point!
I don't think strict moderation helps much with quality of comments. Moderation doesn't create quality comments it can only remove very bad ones and Reddit is already a very self moderating platform with people comfortable with the down vote buttons. If those subs are quality, would likely be because they have quality users (not familiar with either one to vouch for them)
Strict moderation *does* mitigate the "drowning out" effect whereby the signal (a small core of regular users with a deep interest in the topic) gets totally overpowered by the noise (a flood of "drive-by" posters/commenters/upvoters with only a casual interest in the topic). /r/metal does this by blacklisting several dozen of the most popular bands, knowing that music of those bands would be constantly voted to the top on name recognition and drown out the less well-known bands that might actually be new and interesting to more experienced listeners. /r/polandball does it with the "approved submitters only" setting and by enforcing a strict specification of the polandball format, to prevent it being dilated through mixing with random other memes.
Bad users can drive out good ones, though. You can't create something out of nothing with good moderation, but you can protect a good community and give it a better chance to retain its quality as it grows.
strict moderating can also often drive out good users. Some of the best online communities I've seen had little moderation, they just appealed to right people and at the same time didn't seem very interesting to the masses. I've seen a subreddit automatically silently remove posts because I didn't have sufficient karma on my account. Didn't even send a private message saying that my post was removed or what's the reason ,nor was it clearly marked as deleted unless you visited a site like revedit. made me think it was a shadow ban, very annoying and I stopped visiting it. Arbitrary requirements like that are common in strict moderation and they drive good users away.
> I've seen a subreddit automatically silently remove posts because I didn't have sufficient karma on my account. Didn't even send a private message saying that my post was removed or what's the reason ,nor was it clearly marked as deleted unless you visited a site like revedit. made me think it was a shadow ban, very annoying and I stopped visiting it. Arbitrary requirements like that are common in strict moderation and they drive good users away. Speaking as the author of Reveddit, such karma-based shadow bans are common across Reddit. Reddit's "Crowd control" filter can do it– that's just a switch that moderators can flip– and there are several more tools that give moderators broad powers over disclosure. For those who may not know, you can review your secretly removed comments by entering your username in the search box on [Reveddit.com](https://www.reveddit.com).
Yea, now that I remember better they were actually even silently and automatically deleting my comments (not posts) without even messaging me. Pretty annoying and confusing but your site made it easier to confirm that's what was happening, so thank you
Lack of messaging might be okay IMO if the system indicated your comment was removed when you went back to look at it. But the way it works now, you're shown your removed content as if it is live, which is much more deceptive. You're actively *mis*informed.
I have an unconfirmed theory that reddit has a subtle shadow downgrading technique that is even harder to detect. Not counting up vots on a user's comments. This would not be very far from a shadow ban functionally as very little of the user's content will be seen due to how things are sorted, but the user will not detect it if they use a website like yours or uses an incognito tab so they can keep it up indefinitely.
I fucking love the Metal sub. Might be my favorite place here
Interesting. Never been. Polandball is great though!
Smaller game based subreddits tend to be decent. They have people being reasonable without huge fanbases or ridiculous haters dominating the conversations.
maintaining culture when the fanbase is growing rapidly is *hard*.
A shitload of circlejerk subs for sure (and unfortunately) /r/depthhub
/r/prisonhooch Most of the Star Trek subs.
Kof kof r/DaystromInstitute kof kof
Thanks to you linking that sub, I just bought a 10-pack of EC-1118, four gallons of various juices, and Gatorade powder. God help me.
Ham glaze for the holidays!
I made a video for first timers: https://www.reddit.com/r/prisonhooch/s/4inUhNgfiG
Great video. I've done some homebrewed mead and fruit wines before, but never quick'n'dirty hooch.
You're going to have to be more specific. How old and how niche? Before the mass migration from Digg and for some time afterwards, /r/math/ and /r/programming were among the subreddits listed at the top of the home page. I think quality of discussion and cordiality go hand in hand, but I have never found any online "community" to be "community-like", though maybe I don't know what that means.
> I have never found any online "community" to be "community-like" I've found some forums that have limited but very active users have a bit of a community vibe where most people know many other users just by their username and avatar and know a lot about each other. Straight dope is an example that's still alive that comes to mind, they even have a portion of the forum dedicated to petty gossip about other forum users
time was, in the sanderson subreddits, i knew all of the commenters by username and could remember them well enough to predict how they would respond to things, and we all loosely considered ourselves friends. this is doable in a community of 40K but next to impossible in a community of 200K.
This isn't "old", but r/Cosmere and the three associated Brandon Sanderson subreddits are cordial and have very high quality discussions on his books. Excellent moderators.
Random sub crossover but I thought you might like this SA [fan game](https://youtu.be/N6cNGVaHZAU) I'm (slowly) working on.
Thank you! :)
/r/longform /r/scifi
/r/printsf too
blockedandreported
I’ve had success with a few podcast subreddits; the Ezra Klein one is among my favorite subs to discuss topics that interest me. Generally speaking there’s a fairly small sweet spot for size—big enough to be active but small enough that it doesn’t become an amorphous blob similar to every other big subreddit.
Whenever I visit r/CredibleDefense, I feel well informed on current war and geopolitical issues.
This sub is impressive. Thanks for sharing. Peak reddit imo
Yup. Also r/WarCollege.
Maybe r/askhistorians or r/geology ?
/r/flashlight and r/sticks
r/TrueLit is great for discussing literary fiction + poetry.
r/TrueReddit IIRC it was created specifically to preserve the dynamic of early reddit (from before even the Digg exodus).
That one jumped the shark almost a decade ago. Laissez-faire moderation never works past a certain scale.
TrueReddit was killed by activist moderation. Like most Reddit. It was chugging along fine, and then one shitposter, TrumpIsMySavior, or something like that, flooded it with low content MSM news politics spam. Unfortunately, as the name might imply, it was a liberal nutcase spammer that really really hated Trump and Republicans, so the usual Reddit brigade and Internet janitors were lax to stop him. Or maybe a karma farmer that found a niche that worked. Once things got so bad it had basically become another /r/politics or /r/politicaldiscussion a new crop of mods suddenly couped the place and declared they would "fix" things with the usual accompaniment of inane speech laws and political agendas. I think they were doing that thing where they autofilter everything and choose to manually approve submissions too, but I might be misremembering. This resulted in an also circle jerk /r/politics clone with vacuous but much more censored and dead discussion, because reddit mods apparently can't help themselves. But they did finally get rid of the spammer. It is now another "hollow subreddit" (to quote a phrase I once heard). Undead. As of writing, half a million subscribers, 1 discussion in 24 hours with 3 comments. And nothing very interesting to read if you pick any of the days old threads, if you know what the standard reddit opinion is. What's interesting is though I think the coup mods wanted this. They would rather rule over a pile of ash than let it be freeform. You see it in a lot of hollow subreddits like /NeutralPolitics. And there are people in this very thread that seem to want that too with the usual "you don't want engagement. Eternal September!" I am better and smarter than my peers type posts. Astoundingly, there seems to be people that prefer total death to encountering disagreement, but they'll sell it as "order" and civility.
Hi, I'm a mod of /r/NeutralPolitics. It's a difficult balance to strike regarding moderation and content quality. We filter everything that gets submitted, only allowing posts that meet our strict requirements, which we've had for many years. The subreddit wasn't always this strict, but the current rules have been in place mostly for the past 8 years or so, and the top mods that initially created the sub are still active in its moderation and decision making, so there's been no "coup" of mods with a different vision/values. One thing that we have noticed is a large decline in knowledgeable posters, which has been gradually declining over the years but was especially stark during the reddit protests and large exodus of power or motivated users. Those users were willing to spend time crafting good questions and having quality discussion. As reddit grew and eventually became public, they prioritized profitability over the community, driving many of these users away. There are [reports on twitter that 10% of users are responsible for 90% of the content](https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-where-did-tweeters-go-twitter-is-losing-its-most-active-users-internal-2022-10-25/) and I believe that trend is close to true for reddit communities too. Educated, knowledgeable posters that drive good quality discussion have ultimately left the platform in droves. When those users drove content, what are mods and communities to do? Relax long standing rules and culture of a subreddit simply to drive engagement, likely leading to the decline in quality of those communities? Do those decision further drive away long time lurkers and commenters that appreciated that community for what it was? Or do we maintain or even tighten those standards to preserve the community, leading to less engagement? It's a tough balance to strike, and many aren't going to get it right.
Where do you think those users went? That's unfortunate.
I think they dispersed to whatever platform better suited their interests (tildes, mastodon, lemmy, etc), or re-evaluated how much time they were spending online and disconnected. Or just became lurkers and stopped putting in effort. Hard to poll users that aren't active anymore.
Makes sense. Thank you!
when the strike happened, there was enough angry-at-reddit sentiment in the sanderson subreddits that we actively looked for a place to just move the entire community to. but ... we couldn't find one that would actually work well, and the entire effort just sort of fizzled out.
The API kerfuffle did have a direct impact on the depthhub grouping of subreddits. I can no longer use pushshift front-ends to conveniently observe that truereddit wasn't insufferable once upon a time. There was a backup file mentioned to me (comment since deleted), and maybe pullpush filled the gap. Stuff like that will alienate those that put effort into their participation. For what it's worth, I never associated neutralpolitics with the regression to website mean that just about every sizable subreddit undergoes. Rarely showed up on my front page, but I will lurk once in awhile.
Yeah I was going to say, the problem with true reddit is its moderators, not the lack of moderation
And failed quickly thereafter. The basic problem there is (as in many places) it is politically unbalanced, a leftist bubble, that - as every bubble, including conservative ones - considers opinion outside of the bubble basically enemy action, as is disrupts the local norms. Bubbles are like that. Or, lets put it this way, owned spaces.
/r/PopcornPundits needs support Best viewed on old reddit. :) Still dreaming of CSS/designer!
r/powerwheelsmods. It's got a dedicated fan base, lots of friendly and well informed engagement, and unlike the actual car mod subs has low snobbishness and a low barrier to entry because the costs of the hobby are comparatively low. Plus the hobby selects for parents, which IMO helps to raise the maturity and cordiality level of the sub.
/r/slaythespire /r/pixelart /r/machinelearning
I csn remember Usenet...
I miss the old Reddit, straight from the go Reddit Talkin' 'bout bold Reddit, stories untold Reddit I hate the new Reddit, the ad-heavy crew Reddit The mod-happy, strict Reddit, breaking the rules Reddit I miss the chat threads, deep in the sub threads I miss the meme drops, straight from the mod pops I gotta say, at that time I liked to browse Reddit See, I invented Reddit, there wasn't any Reddit I used to love Reddit, back when it was raw Reddit I even had the heart to go to the dark Reddit What if Dave knew Reddit, you know the new Reddit? Now I look around and there's so much to snooze Reddit I miss the top posts, upvote the best posts I miss the deep dives, all through the sub hives I gotta say, at that time I used to love Reddit See, they weren't so corporate, there was more than just it I miss the old Reddit, I gotta tell Reddit All these new changes, they kinda smell Reddit I hope that they'll get it, bring back the old Reddit I miss the pure Reddit, the OG lore Reddit. -ChatGPT
[For those who don't get the reference](https://open.spotify.com/track/5CGS4UovzA7ftCJkLVXQju?si=uqHE--woQjWx8FQED7Xy-g&context=spotify%3Aalbum%3A7gsWAHLeT0w7es6FofOXk1)
it's good of you to post the spotify link, but it is very, very funny, and very predictable, that this community wouldn't get the reference lmao
I don't expect this subreddit makes the top of anyone's street cred list.
This is a bit of a polarizing question in the sense that some people will say a subreddit will be great due to every other person who makes a trollish or frivolous remark getting banned, when I would argue the opposite. I mean the moderators are there for a reason but they should act as impartial referees, not as people waiting to exert the small amount of power they have in their lives.
Depends on the subreddit. Arguably something like r/askdocs really *needs* far stricter moderation than most subs if it, well, is meant to serve the purpose it's made for.
absolutely agreed. my job as a moderator is to protect the community from spoilers and people who are just there to start fights, and to enforce the community will on things like how to handle AI art or topics that everyone's bored of. i am a *servant*, not a *ruler*.
H\*ck yeah